Part 16 (1/2)
I got hiave him my Shakespear as a keepsake, with a billy and pannikin, and a few days' rations Iscientifically while he lay heart-broken on his bunk; then I walked with him to the Echuca road So he sorrowed his way northward, in renewed search of his brother Larry; and, as I watched his diht be enticed into the htably drunk, and fall in for a reiven in charge fora disturbance, and wind up the adventure with a month in Her Majesty's jail It seemed to me that no milder dispensation of Providence would satisfy his moral requirements
Drastic, but such is life
I had a letter from hiible, and as he had omitted to head the communication with any address, and as he referred to the place where he orking as ”the station,”no names except those of his felloorkmen, I had to withhold the response for which his forlorn soul craved
”Takes a lot of different sorts of people toto the hero of inal remark,” commented Ward ”And it seems to me that people's as much alike as sheep; and Dan's just one of the flock I always speak of a inal rereater fools than Dan-- if you only knehere to drop across theinal remark, number three,” put in Andreas five years older than any of the boys ”You're all chaps of great experience”
”Speaking of Dan, as you call hinise the Hercules; and if he knows as much about all other historical subjects as he does about Cawnpore and the American Presidents, he must have ripened into an extraordinary man But then, an extraordinary man should have learned the difference between mallee and yarran in five years of solid scrub-- observation”
”Well, you are gauging hin to his class of e to that gilgie as you were, and had got the saave you, he would have found it first shot
When a certain class of bushnua', heSame mental slovenliness in women A woman will tell a yarn that no man can make head or tail of, but it's as clear as day to any other woht to be told, she'll think she understands it, and you'll think so too, if she says nothing
But if she chances any remark about it, you'll see that the correctness of style has carried it over her head”
”Speaking of style reminds me that Dan's a bit of an author,” remarked Williamson ”One day I was in his place, and he casually showed s And, rand
Knocks Ouida into a cocked hat”
”Well, I alad to hear that,” I observed ”Useful sort of e, or better,” replied Andrews ”Nothing brilliant, but careful and trustworthy Revolves in hisobt without a what-you-ested ”How far is his hut froht mile north-west of where you dropped the first lot of wire that time”
”Can't I take him on the way to Mulppa?”
”Yes; but don't trust hiraphy Better put up at his place to-night, and you'll reach Mulppa in good ti of yours when you get in range of Dan's place He's great on strychnine; and the station gets the benefit of it in tays--he keeps his paddock clear of dingoes, and he never has a scalp to sell”
By this time, breakfast was concluded; and in twofellows had laid down the best route to Mulppa, via Dan's hut
Then a short official intervieith Mr Spanker, followed by a long, desultory gossip, brought me another couple of hours nearer the final reward ofIn another hour,a drink of tea and a bit of brownie in the men's hut
A fewthis refreshment well down by means of the exercise hich he habitually opened the day's work
But this was to be accepted in the sae of a faithful pastor It was all in the contract I hadhim only on loose sand-hills, or in soft swaht By that ti had been established between us, at an expense of only three spills--once through an unexpected change of tactics; once through ence; and once in spite of my best endeavours, for the faithless sas dry I dare say Isin, but I did n't want to be pestered with people borrowing him
However, beforewhich I had started with the wire, nearly three years before Here and there thetea track
Presently the heavy wheel-ht, and disappeared in the all-pervading scrub Then the faint track became suddenly fainter, where half the scanty traffic branched off to the left, in the direction of Lindsay's paddock
It is not in our cities or townshi+ps, it is not in our agricultural orareas, that the Australian attains full consciousness of his own nationality; it is in places like this, and as clearly here as at the centre of the continent To me the monotonous variety of this interrave, subdued, self-centred; so alien to the genial appeal of randeur of e To me this ard diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by Nature in her Iht only by those willing to discern through the crudeness of dawn a promise of majestic day Eucalypt, conifer, mimosa; tree, shrub, heath, in endless diversity and exuberance, yet sheltering little of animal life beyond half-specialised and belated types, anachronistic even to the Aboriginal savage Faithfully and lovingly interpreted, what is the latenthas she tarried her bridal day! Pause and think how she has waited in serene loneliness while the deltas of Nile, Euphrates, and Ganges expanded, inch by inch, to spacious provinces, and the Yellow Sea shallowed up with the silt of winters innumerable--waited while the priol crept out, step by step, from paleolithic silence into the uncertain record of Tradition's earliest fable--waited still through the long eras of successive e little by little, moved ard, ard, round the circumference of the planet, at last to overtake and doeless, tireless, acquiescent, her history a blank, while the petulant ave place to imperial purpose, stern yet beneficent--waited whilst the interminable procession of annual, lunar and diurnal alternations lapsed unrecorded into a dead Past, bequeathing no register of good or evil endeavour to the ever-living Present
The mind retires from such speculation, unsatisfied but impressed
Gravely impressed For this recordless land--this land of our lawful solicitude and imperative responsibility--is exempt from many a bane of territorial rather than racial ies of petrified injustice; she is clogged by no fealty to shadowy idols, enshrined by Ignorance, and upheld by e alone; she is cursed by no memories of fanaticism and persecution; she is innocent of hereditary national jealousy, and free from the envy of sister states
Then think how iher are the possibilities of a Future than the an By colozed beyond all senorance, brutality and baseness; a drag rather than a stimulus